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Friday, 29 June 2018

I was recently asked to collaborate in a photographic
project documenting the supposed ‘decadence of clowning in western culture’. My
response was to ask, ‘what decadence?’ I have been involved in clowning
performance, teaching and research since the mid-1980s and from my perspective
there is a continuous stream of people interested in training in clowning and performing
it, as well as in exploring its social use beyond the orthodox set-up of
performer/spectator and into the realms of healthcare and politics. Clowning
has also gained a modest recognition in academic circles, with the publication of
a range of books over the past couple of decades.

But my instinct to see the positive trend in clowning is
also counter-balanced by my concern about the direction clowning is taking in
western culture. Barnaby King, in his recent book. ‘’Clowning as Social
Performance in Colombia’, wrote tellingly about how the influx into the country
of an ‘international style’ of clowning, from Europe via Argentina, could be
read as paralleling the ‘apertura’, or opening up to global markets, of
Colombia. This ‘globalised’ style of clowning might even threaten local and indigenous
ways of understanding the artform, which is of concern.

I witnessed something similar during my return visit to
South Africa some months ago, when a major theatre festival programmed, for the
first time, a piece of ‘clown theatre’. A laudable move, indeed. But the piece
was an unfortunate, and perhaps isolated, example, of how safe clowning has
sometimes become. It could have originated in any part of Europe or North
America. But its seeming lack of insights, whether personal, political, cultural
or aesthetic, nonetheless drew considerable approval from middle-class white audiences
who would normally go to see standard theatrical fare. I felt like we could
have been anywhere - London, Paris, Bogotá. This is a far cry from the classic example of South African clown-influenced theatre from the 1980s, 'Woza Albert!' (see photo)

This blandness was nowhere to be seen, however, when workshopping
clowning with Sowetan teenagers, who, when asked to ‘do something silly to make
us laugh’, would come up with the most outlandish, grotesque and daft things imaginable,
setting everyone off in bursts of uncontrollable laughter. Back in London, one
just has to imagine presenting audiences with that kind of clowning to quickly
realise that the most common reaction would be to back off. In my experience, the
grotesque in clowning is getting harder and harder to pull off, in our society where
‘taste’ means seeking out yet more uncrossable lines which clowns should stay
clear of.

My other work in South Africa was with Clown Without
Borders, who in that country are different in that they work extensively within
their own country. Elsewhere in the world, it is more common for CWB projects to
be expeditions travelling some distance across the globe. Many of these
projects do great things, but a side-effect can sometimes be the inadvertent exportation
of the western idea of what a clown is.

The multiplication of distancing might explain in some way
the drift from clowning towards stand-up which is another concern right now. It’s
probably always been the case that British clown students and performers have
been tempted by the culturally dominant magnets of irony, sarcasm and wit, but
lately it seems like it’s getting harder to resist. With performers with little
or no clown-factor now boldly advertising themselves as clown-influenced
Gaulier graduates, it looks like the picture is going to get even more
confused. Does anyone still want to be a clown?

Friday, 22 June 2018

I’m returning to blogging, as a way of bypassing the academic model, which has frankly become a bit of a dead end
lately, with its jealously guarded sites of knowledge exchange - accredited modules, peer-reviewed journals, niche conferences - becoming ever more ponderous and exclusive. That doesn't mean I'll be stopping teaching at universities, speaking at academic conferences, or publishing books, but am looking forward to a more open-ended medium through which I can communicate.

The return to blogging also marks perhaps the end of a very productive few years of engagement with Facebook, through the group Clown Theory which I created a few years ago. I was curious then to know others’ opinions on matters I was grappling with. It’s gone relatively quiet recently, mainly I think because we’ve ended up having the same conversations and debates several times over. Also, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It can be daunting entering an online discussion sometimes, where even clowns can come across as bossy, dismissive or knowalls. The blog might be my way to fill the gap, then.

It might prove useful for mulling over things which will later find their way into books. It will also allow me to bring to light more immediately some of the fascinating insights which occur weekly in my work. These insights can crop up in a clown class, in a rehearsal or in a performance or while reading about or watching other clowns. I have always felt that theory, thinking, teaching, learning, performing and spectating are one single activity. I hope, then, to bring the thinking out into the open for those who haven’t been in those classes or rehearsals. Perhaps that will help some people decide to go deeper into clowning and do some, or more, training, or even just watch a show. That would be good.

It’s been a few years since I regularly wrote short or medium length pieces about clowning. I began ClownBlog to test out some ideas when I started my job as a research fellow at CSSD
in 2007, investigating clown and actor training. Much of those blog posts later
fed into my first book, Clown Readings, and influenced the second one too, Clown Training. I then got caught up in writing my PhD thesis, and a third book, The Clowning Workbook, currently under way.

Although I have always
continued to generate my own teaching and performance work, during that time I
became accustomed to the academic model of writing/practice. That is to say,
academic employees in the performing arts are expected these days to produce
research outputs in order to justify their posts. This is because of the vast amount of
money that universities receive for research, the amount of which is determined
by how far up the league table (REF), they get, every seven years. To gain their
position they must show research outputs. Since the early 2000s, in the performing
arts we have realised that we hold knowledge, in the practices we engage in. So
that research doesn’t have to be in a library or written. Knowledge can be gained and transmitted through the practice of performance. A simple and early example often given was
the knowledge I have from having learned to ride a bicycle. This is embodied
knowledge. The research of such knowledge has come to be known as Practice-as-Research (PaR). Quite a simple idea, really.

Many drama schools,
incorporating themselves into universities and thus enabling grants to be given
to students, thus found themselves obliged to produce research. But instead of
drawing on the knowledge and practices of those who taught and practiced acting, directing, writing and stagecraft, the trend has been to import
researchers from fields which, from a conservatoire point of view, are marginal.
Today, you are more likely to get work in PaR if your practice is in intermedial
studies, or if you have no practice at all, and highly unlikely if you research
in practices of acting, circus or, in my case,clowning.

The publishing of performing arts research has
also followed the traditional route and has, if anything, narrowed down. To keep your job, you must publish. That means that publishing in itself has no
value, monetarily. Journal articles make money for the publisher but never for
the author. Access is expensive for researchers and only really feasible via
university libraries which can pay the exorbitant fees. That leaves those
without access to university libraries out in the cold. Likewise, even if you
have single-authored a book, the royalties are so minimal as to be meaningless.
And often the price tag on an academic book is way out of reach of individuals.
Once again, it’s the libraries who can afford it.

So, instead of chasing a
non-existent academic post by conforming to the academic publishing mode, i.e.
not being paid, I’ve decided to put my writing energies back into a more
immediate public sphere, the blog.

Without wanting to be a
hostage to fortune, the areas I’m hoping to write about look like they’ll fall
into the following categories:

Facebook Badge

Twitter

ClownBlog

This blog is one part of my asking and trying to answer the questions that are most important to me as a clown performer, teacher, director, historian, critic and researcher. Here are a few of them to be going on with:

what is a clown in the 21st century?
what do they do?
what are they for?
do clowns change over history and across cultures?
what is their true history?
how can we train clowns better?

more polemically...
why are women clowns underrepresented?
why are people obsessed with red noses?
what myths about "traditional" and "post-Lecoquian" clowns need to be thrown into the dustbin?
why is the fad for being afraid of clowns not altogether a bad thing?

About Me

I am a clown performer, teacher, director, researcher, writer and musician with 30 years experience.I've toured festivals, theatres, tents, streets and bars throughout Europe from Sicily to the Arctic. I trained at the École Philippe Gaulier and Fool Time Circus School (Bristol). As well as performing solo, I am artistic director of the clown/circus/pantomime company, Stupididity.
I was co-founder of the Escola de Clown de Barcelona, one of the world’s leading centres offering comprehensive clown training programmes covering both practical and theoretical aspects of the clown arts. I previously taught clown, impro, and acting at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona from 1996-2006, and was a Research Fellow investigating clown training at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London), where I am now a visiting lecturer as well as researching clown performance and clown discourses.
I am the author of Clown Readings in Theatre Practice and Clown Training, a practical guide, both published by Palgrave Macmillan.
http://www.jondavison.net